A while ago I asked a market analyst if he could identify the magic ingredient that changed camera phones from a niche technology into ubiquitous consumables, assuming he’d say it happened when engineers worked out how to get enough megapixels into the things to make the photographs actually worth looking at. His answer was Facebook. …
Mondo apocalypto
The annual year-end bun grapple over at Critic’s Notebook brings the inevitable list: Ten films I liked from 2011. At this rate next December’s apocalypse will be caused entirely by the posting online of more Top Ten Films of 2012 lists than the cosmos can allow. Updated to add: I didn’t realise that Julia Leigh’s …
Live from the Acme Retirement Castle
The challenge in covering Bristol’s Encounters Film Festival, once you’ve calculated a route to Canon’s Road that doesn’t actually involve Canon’s Road on a Saturday night, is to accept the inevitable: A festival report that attempts to describe everything screened at a short-film festival would have to rumble on for a week. Even one limited …
Ride that switchback
Three months ago the US laser sector was pondering the need to stock up on canned food and shotguns, but the sky remains un-fallen for the only reason that matters: on the whole demand has failed to collapse. There’s a large pile of caveats. Concentrating on the year-on-year figures helps avoid the headache that reading …
The wives of others
Those caught on the receiving end of my enthusiasm for Paul Verhoeven films will be surprised that I remembered to ask Sebastian Koch about his new film Albatross, and didn’t spend our entire interview grilling him about Black Book. In fact my cunning plan to spend the interview asking about Black Book and then shout …
One of our spy’s wives is missing
George Smiley’s school days. And Connie Sachs’ too for that matter. Trace almost anything interesting in new films back a bit and Alex Cox will pop up at some point. Come on film gods: The man links Ed Harris and Miguel Sandoval with Edward Tudor-Pole and Michelle Winstanley. Let him loose more often. My main …
He said, she said
Céline Sciamma’s effortlessly touching film Tomboy gets its message across in so many subtle ways that the one moment of deliberate directorial flourish leaves you suddenly adrift. Having made a point of regarding Laure, the ten-year-old girl in the process of passing herself off as a ten-year-old boy, with a minimum of nervous excitement and …
Summer of discontent
So the unalloyed good news didn’t stay pure for long. In April the US optics and laser sector was not only happy to find itself recovering, but daring to use words like “optimistic” and “robust.” Since then: complete mayhem. I spoke to Mark Douglass of Longbow Research for Optics.org, and discussed why the clouds were …
The appliance of science
Project Nim gives the scientific method a long withering stare, and in the process deserves a place on the Christmas lists of scientists everywhere, ready to be produced the next time someone asks why their profession can sometimes have such trouble getting from A to B. It won’t answer the question, but it’ll prove that …
Immigrant song
The absence of grit in A Better Life is more about director Chris Weitz taking a thought experiment out for a spin than any lack of nerve. All the space that a story of migrant workers and familial strife would normally fill with hand-held camerawork and hard-core frowning gets used instead for deliberately lush photography …
